SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

actually this mountain on top is an encyclopedic compendant that gives you a hint of the
secrets that you will find when you open it. There are of course ranges of much larger ones, the
famous one in [sounds like “Oupsella”?] which is almost room size; it takes by the way four
rooms to empty all the contents out that are in there but what I want to draw your attention to
is that if you walk around the one in [sounds like “Oupsella”?] there are water splashes on the
back because of you could also wash your face; there’s a basin in there so that not only did- so
it’s the all purpose toolbox. I want you to think of it in that mechanical term, a way in which
one can also make the analogy to the Internet.
One final point because I don’t want to get- lose my time is these are also haptic. There are
drawers that pull out, a panel that pulls out so that you could lay contents, you could speak
with people that you show. Some of the larger ones actually have musical instruments, spinets,
claviers, and there were both artificial and natural clocks concealed in the shelves and so on.
So that we can say that the way in which you experience these devices is a totally sensory
involving way. It’s not merely optical and so a kind of divination is technological ritual in the
way you would explore it. I show you here just the remainder of the gallery space.
[The next on the right please.] I’m now going to show a series of six installation shots, just
simply to show them, so that you can see the kinds of juxtapositions coming actually out of my
analogy book—a news kind of organization where the pattern itself is informative. Where the
past is not that beautiful quote, the White Queen quote by Maryhelen of that the past is not
separated from the present, the past is the future. There’s Suzanne Anker’s lovely piece so that
we have the Michael Light and Suzanne Anker; we have the microcosm, macrocosm of the
body and the Michael Light and looking straight through because there’s a tunnel in the
middle so that not only do you have all the drawers but you have crisscrossing. Very nice in
terms of analogical structure just showing you some of the details. It floats on top as you saw it,
this podium which has glass so that you’re not constantly having the obtrusiveness of vitrines,
documentation and art materials at the same level not separated. Looking through here, a
wonderful rare Jeff Wall, A Ventriloquist at a Birthday Party in October 1947, and facing, the
Lucas Samaras box which almost killed Fran and me; we argued for a complex exhibition,
getting away from linear constructions to a non-linear layout.
I’m totally leaving behind Plato’s cave as primeval cabaret. This is just to show you something
of the foldout potential, as in cladistics or phylogenetics which try to show how species both
extent and extinct are related. The potency of all these objects and their workings out in the
wundertrunk derive less from sheer number that from their complex branching surprise
groupings and multitude-ness interactions with the changing environment and the shifting
perceiver or the shifting beholder so that you’re constantly moving in and out and this
arrangement, this pattern is an intelligent pattern, an associational pattern in that sense. It’s not
a free for all.
[Both slides please.] Both a crafty container housing a microcosm of natural and artificial
prodigies and an absolute instrument drawing into itself no less than everything, the
wundertrunk and its progeny invite the user to join the distributive singularities into a network
or correspondences so you get away from this notion of a passing viewer. The need to handle or
perform the objects—this theatrical performative dimension—has to do with an active notion of
knowledge, an active theory of education if you will. Collections of rarities, now I want to show
you how quickly they’re remediated so you don’t think that this is just one kind of object.
5